An Overview

Axel Randrup

International Center for Interdisciplinary Psychiatric Research
(CIRIP)

arandrup@mobilixnet.dk
Written 2000-2002.

Abstract

The idealist attitude followed in this paper is based on the assumption
that only conscious experience in the Now is real. Conscious experience
in the Now is supposed to be known directly or intuitively, it
can not be explained. I think it constitutes the basis of all ontology.
Consciousness is conceived as the total of conscious experience
in the Now, the ontology of consciousness is thus derived directly
from the basis. The ontology of nature is derived more indirectly
from the basis. Science is regarded as a catalog of selected conscious
experiences (observations), acknowledged to be scientific and structured
by means of concepts and theories (also regarded as conscious experiences).
Material objects are regarded as heuristic concepts constructed
from the immediate experiences in the Now and useful for expressing
observations within a certain domain with some of their mutual
relations. History is also regarded as a construct from conscious
experiences in the Now. Concepts of worlds without an ego are seen
to be in harmony with immediate egoless experiences. Worlds including
spirituality are conceived as based on immediate spiritual experiences
together with other immediate experiences. Idealist or immaterial
philosophies have been criticized for implying solipsism or "solipsism
of the present moment". This critique is countered by emphasizing
the importance of intersubjectivity for science and by introducing
the more precise concepts of collective conscious experience and
collective conscious experience across time. Comprehensive evidence
supporting the heuristic value of these concepts is related.
I conclude that the idealist approach leads to a coherent comprehension
of natural science including mind-brain relations, while the mainstream
materialist approach entails contradictions.and other problems
for a coherent understanding. The idealist approach and the notion
of collective conscious experience also facilitates cross-cultural
studies and the underestanding of intersubjectivity.

Introduction

In preceding papers the author has tried to expound an idealist
ontology stating that only conscious experience in the Now is real.
This challenges the currently dominant materialist ontology in
the natural sciences, nevertheless it does maintain the methodological
presupposition that all scientific research - materialist, idealist,
or dualist - rests on empirical observations from which concepts
and theories are derived (Randrup 1997, 1999, 2002).

In this ontology, or philosophy the immediate conscious experience
in the psychological Now is fundamental, and I shall therefore
begin with this topic and from that develop the ontology of consciousness,
nature, intersubjectivity, history. worlds without an ego, and
worlds comprising spiritual experiences.

Content and Temporal Extension of the Psychological Now

A number of time studies and psychological experiments indicate
that the psychological Now is experienced with a certain temporal
extension and therefore differs from the physical moment or point
of time, which is regarded as infinitesimal with zero duration.

Thus the psychologist Rubin (1934) performed experiments with " two
very short sound stimuli in the outer physical world succeeding
one another." When the interval between the two sound stimuli
was short, a fifth of a second (in physical time), Rubin's immediate
experience was:

Quite contrary to our general notion of time, the experience does
not occur that
one of the sounds is present and that the other belongs either
to the just
expected future or to the immediate past. Either both of them are
past or both of
them are future or both of them have the character of being present,
although
they are experienced as a succession.

I find that Rubin's results stand out for their clarity and significance.
Searching the literature I have found no direct replication, continuation
or critique of Rubins work, but there are several authors who concur
with Rubin in assuming that the perceptual or experiential Now
possesses extension. Fraisse (1975) has, like Rubin performed many
phenomenological observations and experiments on the psychology
of time, and he thinks that our perception of change is characterized
by the integration of successive stimuli in such a way that they
can be perceived with relative simultaneity (p. 12). He also states
that when he hears the tick-tock from a clock, the tick is not
yet part of his past, when he hears the tock, so the order of the
tick and the tock is perceived directly (pp. 72-73, 117).

Whitehead (1920, p. 69) thinks that "the ultimate terminus
of awareness is a duration with temporal thickness" and that "the
present is a wavering breadth of boundary" between the extremes
of memory and anticipation. Denbigh (1981, p. 17) thinks that the "specious
present" (or "perceptual present") gives to temporal
awareness a certain degree of "spread", and he quotes
William James for asserting that the perceptual present is not
like a knife edge, but more like a saddle-back. More recently Varela
(1999, p. 119) has stated that "the very mode of appearance
of nowness is in the form of extension, and to speak of a now-point
obscures this fact". Hayward (1987) writes about relations
between the sciences and Buddhism, and he states that conscious
experience occurs as series of moments of finite duration (p. 168).

Within the extension of the Now there is room for a rich content
including both memories and anticipations, which can be seen as
special modes of experience in the Now. Memories and anticipations
in the Now can of course, together with the eperience of succession,
form a basis for construction of concepts of time. These concepts
(also conscious experiences) can then become part of the psychological
Now. The philosopher Henri Bergson (1980) studied the immediate
experience of successions, and found that such experiences, for
instance the notes of a melody penetrate each other and form a
whole (pp. 74-79). He contended that the time of science and of
daily life is an abstraction from these immediate experiences.
I find that Bergson's views correspond well with the description
of the content of the Now by Gurwitsch and Arvidson, which is related
below. Also Buddhist and other Indian psychology have found that
physical time is an "abstraction", a "construction" or
a "conceptual fabrication" (Hayward 1987, pp. 166,169,
Inada 1991, pp. 470-471, Mahadevan, 1992, p. 578). Nicholas of
Cusa (15th century) held similar views of the Now: "All time
is comprised in the present or 'now'..... time is only a methodological
arrangement of the present. The past and the future, in consequence,
are the development of the present" (quoted in Perry 1971,
p. 840).

I think that other concepts, theories and observations of science
are likewise abstracted, abducted or constructed from the whole
of the psychological Now. The reading of a measuring instrumant
can serve as an example: usually only the position of the pointer
is recorded, while its color and shape together with many other
features of the perceptual whole are ignored (Marchais and Randrup
1991, p. 2).

The rich content and the structure of the Now has been studied
extensively by Gurwitsch (1985) followed by Arvidson (2000). Arvidson
states: "At each and every moment of experience, with few
exceptions, there is a figure and a ground, a focus of attention
and a context for that focus". At the periphery of this "thematic
field" Arvidson thinks that there is the contents of "marginal
consciousness" (p. 3). In the succession of moments a marginal
item may move into the thematic field (p. 14). I concur with these
views, and I think they help to understand the way concepts and
theories are constructed from the whole of the psychological Now.

Strictly speaking the conscious content of the Now constitutes
the only sure basis of all our knowledge, and if we accept that
the Now contains both successions, memories, anticipations and
focal or marginal awareness of many items, this basis will be sufficient
for construction of concepts and theories, including theories about
ontology. Concepts and theories are also experienced in the Now,
in the focus or the margin. The central importance of the Now in
the idealist position developed here indicates that further scientific
studies of the psychology of the Now will yield information of
fundamental significance. Studies by Sorenson (1998) of indigenous
people living in isolated enclaves around the world have revealed
a kind of consciousness focussed within a flux of sentient immediacy,
where experience is not clearly subdivided into separable components.
I expect that further studies of this kind of consciousness, "preconquest
consciousness" will contribute significantly to the knowledge
of immediate experience in the Now. The change of preconquest consciousness
under foreign influence may yield material for understanding the
process of extraction of separable components from the immediate
experience in the Now and the formation of concepts and theories.

The Ontology of Consciousness

In the English scientific and philosophic literature the term "consciousness" is
used with several very different meanings. Here are some examples
showing the span of the variation:

"Consciousness is a neurological system like any other, with
functions such as the long-term direction of behavior ... " (Bridgeman
1980)

"Consciousness ... is best regarded as an aspect of the system's
behaviour, the latter admitting of both overt and covert dimensions." (Cotterill
2001, p. 13)

"Consciousness is information" (Goldberg 1996, pp. 12,
32)

The universe is fundamentally a great mind. Consciousness is seen
as primary, and matter as a projection of consciousness (Orme-Johnson,
Zimmerman and Hawkins 1997).

Wuthnow (1976, p. 60) proposes that consciousness may be defined "as
the ongoing process of constructing reality out of symbols and
experience." This is an example of functionalism which in
general views consciousness as a brain process or mode of functioning
(Velmans 1990, p. 79). Wuthnow (p. 65) also thinks that consciousness "needs
to be recognized as not simply a psychological phenomenon, but
as a process linked in important ways to the functioning of society."

"...the most important thing about consciousness is that
it's a social attribute" (Freeman and Burns 1996, p. 180).

Brown (1977, p. 150) thinks that "consciousness is a manifestation
of both the achieved cognitive level and the full series of cognitive
levels at a given moment in psychological time."

At a study week on brain and conscious experience the Vatican
Academy of Science expressed this view: "As to the further
meaning of the term "consciousness" the Study Week intends
that it strictly designates the psychophysiological concept of
perceptual capacity, of awareness of perception, and the ability
to act and react accordingly." (quoted in Uttal 1978, p. 7).

"An awareness of awareness of self and environment in time" is
suggested as a definition of consciousness by Strehler (1991, p.
45).

"..... by focusing the attention on the sheer clarity and
the sheer cognizance [the event of knowing] of experience, one
attends to the defining characteristics of consciousness alone,
as opposed to the qualities of other objects of consciousness.
(Wallace 1999, p. 183).

Antony (2001, p. 34) relates a view of consciousness from the
beginning of the twentieth century. "Any contents of consciousness
... are not parts or features of consciousness, but simply what
consciousness is conscious of ."

Woodhouse (1997, p. 256) writes: "The sense of consciousness
with which I will begin and subsequently develop is that of awareness
per se, irrespective of the objects or contents of awareness ...
this fundamental sense is at bottom simple and indefinable, and
we are forced to rely, in part, on each person's intuitive underdstanding
of what it means to be conscious."

Here I will understand consciousness as the total of conscious
experience in the Now (individual, collective or egoless, see below),
immediate experience as well as constructs, concepts and theories.
Conscious experience (or just experience) is supposed to be known
directly or intuitively, it can not be explained. I think it constitutes
the given basis of all ontology. The ontology of consciousness
is then derived directly from this basis.

I believe that the word "consciousness" is today often
used in the sense of awareness per se separated from its content
(as described by Wallace, by Antony, and by Woodhouse above). In
this sense consciousness is a partition or construction from the
direct experience. The ontology of consciousness understood in
this way is derived from the immediate experience too, but less
directly. This also applies to the ontology of consciousness understood
in all the other ways reported above.

When we go to other cultures and languages the ambiguities in
the understanding of consciousness become still greater. Thus in
French the word "conscience" can often be translated
adequately by "consciousness", but in certain contexts
it corresponds to English "conscience". Further, the
French word "connaissance" corresponds to English "consciousness" in
certain contexts, while it most often corresponds to "knowledge".
In Danish the term "bevidsthed" corresponds quite well
with English "consciousness". Wilkes (1988) writes about
the history of the English term "conscious(ness)" and
states that it arrives late in its present (range of) sense(s).
The term "consciousness" with a recognizabble modern
meaning did not appear until 1678. Earlier "conscious" referred
to"shared knowledge", while the term "inwit" had
some overlap with today's term "consciousness" Wilkes
also writes about the Ancient Greek, the Chinese, and the Croatian
languages. She thinks that there is no generally adequate translation
for "consciousness" or "mind" in these languages,
but is not denying that there are specific contexts in which the
English terms are translated perfectly by terms such as psyche,
sophia, nous, metanoia, or aistesis in Greek, yishi in Chinese,
and duh or um in Croatian. From Israel I have been informed that
it is difficult to give a good translation of the English word "mind" in
Hebrew, since there are 5 - 6 possible words, each of them with
a special shade (Miriam Schwarz 1982, personal communication, ).

It thus seems that it is not impossible to learn from other cultures
about concepts of consciousnes and the ontology of consciousness,
but great care will be necessary, because of the linguistic and
general cultural differences. This applies to what I write in the
following sections about Chinese, Buddhist, Japanese and other
foreign views. I rely on texts written in English or Danish by
authors with insight in the respective cultures.

The Ontology of Nature Including Mind - Brain Relations

The dominant ontology of the Western scientific culture is materialist
realism which assumes that what scientific theories describe is
a material world existing independent of human consciousness and
cognition. This view has proved useful and productive within a
certain, large domain of the study of nature, but it has been contested
by many philosophers (Knight 2001; Randrup 1997, with references),
and a number of scientific findings made in the 20th century have
been difficult to accomodate in this ontology. Thus neuropsychologists
now contend that our cognitive capacities and therefore also our
cognitions depend on our brain, and this contradicts the assumption
that nature as described by science should be basically independent
of human cognition. The same contradiction appears in the study
of evolution and cognition (evolutionary epistemology) and has
been discussed within this discipline. Other examples of contradictions
and problems consequential to the assumption of a world "out
there" are found within the disciplines second order cybernetics,
statistics, and physics (Randrup 1997 and submitted).

Doubts about the materialist ontology (or realism) have been expressed
by various physicists. Thus Laszlo (1996, p. 32) writes: "As
of today the mainstream theorists of the quantum world have not
succeeded in giving an unambigous answer to the question, 'what
is matter?' ". And Barrow (1988, p.16) states: "It appears
that science is best done by believing that realism is true, even
if in fact it isn't" . The newer theories involving superstrings
and supermembranes have made the doubts still more disturbing.
These theoretical entities, extremely small, are believed to be
fundamental constituents of matter, but direct effects of them
can not be assessed experimentally, and the belief in their existence
rests on the usefulness of the theories in which they are embedded.
They may therefore be conceived as heuristic theoretical concepts
rather than pieces of matter, and the superstring theories have
been regarded as mathematical philosophy rather than physics (Brown
1991, Nathan 2000).

A clear and radical position was taken by Lindsay and Margenau
(1949, p. 1) who begin their book "Foundations of Physics" with
the statement: "Physics is concerned with a certain portion
of human experience". This expresses an idealist conception
of physics, and at the same time an extension of the usual conceptions
of consciousness to embrace also the domain of physics. These authors
find that the belief in a real material world behind our senseperceptions
may tend to encourage too close adherence to reasonably successful
physical theories with too small allowance for their necessary
revision to meet the demands of new experience (p. 3).

In the idealist ontology proposed here, science is regarded as
a catalog of selected conscious experiences (observations) acknowledged
to be scientific and structured by means of concepts and theories
(also regarded as conscious experiences). Material objects are
thus regarded as heuristic concepts useful for expressing observations
within a certain domain with some of their mutual relations. This
reinterpretation of materialist objects allows a direct understanding
and use of traditional scientific theories without accepting their
ontology (Marshall 2001, p. 60, Randrup 1997, section 4). The idealist
ontology emphasizes the role of the evidence in science and is
particularly open to new theories and to the application of more
than one theory and set of concepts to a domain of observations
(Lindsay and Margenau 1949, pp. 1-3, Randrup 1992, 1994, 1997b,
Wallace 1996, pp. 25-27, 113-114,148-150, 190).

The idealist ontology of nature also readily accomodates the intense
nature experiences known as nature spirituality (Randrup 1997).
These intense, direct nature-experiences are felt by the experient
to be essential and important, indicating that they must be real
and that nature primarily is an experience. These experiences are
thus felt to be in conflict with the materialist view that nature
exists separated from and independent of the "observer".
Also on more secular ground many people resist the alienation from
nature entailed by strict materialist realism, and tend to retain
naive (or direct) realism, where material nature is believed to
be as perceived.
The mind-body or mind-brain problem is now often called "the
hard problem", meaning that it is hard to understand how a
material brain can produce consciousness. I believe that the hardness
of the problem is a direct implication of the materialist ontology,
and that therefore the problem cannot be "solved" as
long as this ontology is applied. Materialist realism is the problem.
(Very recently Marshall (2001, p. 60) has expressed similar views
on the hardness of the mind-brain problem). With the idealist ontology
the mind-brain relations are relations between conscious experiences
(observations) constituting the material brain (here seen as a
heuristic concept) and other conscious experiences. It is readily
understood that such relations are possible, and they can be studied
in detail by comparing the results from neurophysiology and from
attention to conscious experiences.

In a number of non-Western cultures and belief systems we encounter
conceptions of the world and the human which are very different
from the dominant conceptions of contemporary Western science.
Clearly those cultures have made different extractions and constructions
from their immediate experiences in the psychological Now.

Writing on East Asian thought Tu (1980) gives a clear account
of such differences. He states that according to East Asian thought
it is fallacious to define human nature merely in terms of biological,
psychological or sociological structures and functions because,
viewed holistically a more comprehensive grasp of its many-sidedness
is required. The uniqueness of being human is an ethicoreligious
question; Ch'an rejects the artificial dichotomy between the body
and the enlightened mind (pp. 167, 172 and 173). Tu also states
that human beings are thought to have the potential power and insight
to penetrate the things-in-themselves (this is in direct opposition
to the Kantian view of the unknowable "Ding an sich")
and that humanity forms an inseparable unity with heaven, earth
and the myriad things (in contrast to the view of a material world
separate from the human mind) (p.169).

At the 8th World Congress of Psychiatry Wig (1990) emphasized
the need for a truly international diagnostic system in psychiatry,
acceptable also in the developing countries. As one of the obstacles
he mentioned conceptual bias, i.a. the body-mind dichotomy.

Stanner (1971) gives an account of Aboriginal Australian beliefs
and conceptions. He states that our contrast of body versus spirit
is not there and the whole notion of the person is enlarged. The
Australians "enfold into some kind of oneness the notions
of body, spirit, ghost, shadow, spirit-site, and totem". The
Australians can also conceive that "man, society and nature
and past, present, and future are at one".

Werblowsky (1971, p. 37) writes about Jewish thinking. Distinction
between body and soul(s) occurs, but the essential feature of rabbinic
anthropology was not the opposition body-soul, but the doctrine
of the two inclinations, the good yeser and the evil yeser. This
dichotomy is still fundamental in contemporary Jewish thinking.

Purely idealist ontologies have been developed by schools within
Buddhism. Thus Wayman (1971, p. 426) writes about "the idealistic
standpoint of the Vijnaptimatra school by which there is no external
object independent of consciousness". And Hsu (1990) has written
a book about the "theory of Pure Consciousness considered
one of the subjective and 'uncompromising' doctrines of idealism" (p.121).
The teory of Pure Consciousness belonged to the Laksana school,
otherwise also called the Yogacara school (p. 81), and it was transmitted
by Xuan Zang to China where it flourished (p. 111). Okuyama (1994,
p. 69) has written about the "Mind-Only" doctrine of
the Yogacara school: "The name Mind- Only came from their
strong belief that all is mind and there is no real world.....outside
world is thought as our illusion created inside of our mind".
Lindtner (1998, p.10) write in a similar way about the ontology
of the Yogacara school: "All the universe consists of consciousness
only" (translated from Danish by the present author). Hollenback
(1996, pp.104-105) refers to the Tibetan treatise "The Yoga
of Knowing the Mind, the Seeing of Reality" inspired by Yogacara
teachings. In this treatise it is claimed that the phenomenal world
is only a mental construct, a creation of our minds. The only reality
is mind - all else is an illusory fabrication of mind.

According to Wallace (1999, p. 176) the following declaration
is attributed to the Buddha himself: "All phenomena are preceded
by the mind. When the mind is comprehended, all phenomena are comprehended." It
is interesting to compare this declaration with the intent of contemporary
physicists to construct a "theory of everything" on a
materialist basis.

This Buddhist idealism accords with more ancient traditions of
the East which assert "that the universe is fundamentally
a great mind, an infinite field of consciousness at the basis of
our mind, far from being a metaphysical notion lying outside the
range of human experience.The great mind is also seen as the basis
of our bodies and all of material existence" (Orme-Johnson,
Zimmerman and Hawkins 1997).

Individual and Collective Conscious Experience. The Ontology
of Intersubjectivity

Immaterialist views such as the idealism proposed here, phenomenalism,
and radical constructivism have been met with the objection that
they are based entirely on private (individual) experiences. Thus
Hirst (1959, pp.94-95) states that material objects are public,
while sense data are private to the percipient, and he asks how
sets of statements about these private sense data can give the
meaning of a statement about a public object.. Likewise it has
been criticized that the immaterialist views are kinds of solipsism
(the idea that the world has no existence outside the thinker's
subjective mind) or may lead to solipsism (Olsen 1986, p. 364,
Russell 1953, p. 623, Von Foerster 1984, pp. 59-60, Von Glasersfeld
1988, p. 86, Watzlawick 1984, p. 15). Whitehead (1978, p. 152)
states that if experience be not based upon an objective content,
there can be no escape from a solipsist subjectivism, and he criticizes
the philosophers Hume and Locke for failing to provide experience
with an objective content. He also states that with Kant's "apparent" objective
content there can be no real escape from a solipsist subjectivism.

It seems to me, however, that this critique is untenable. It is
based on the presumption that conscious experiences are always
individual, but it can be contended that this presumption is far
from sure. It ignores the phenomenon of intersubjectivity which
is important in science, also in mainstream science, as well as
the logically possible more precise concept collective conscious
experience.

In order to be recognized as scientific, an observation has to
be confirmed by several scientists - become intersubjective. A
new observation or concept may originate with one person, then
the scientific community will work to test, if intersubjectivity
can be obtained. In accordance with the assumption that consciousness
is always individual, each person having his own experiences separated
from those of other persons, an intersubjective observation is
often conceived of as the same observation or experience distributed
over different individual minds or consciousnesses. If, for instance,
two persons together are reading a meter with digital display,
it is assumed in scientific work that they read exactly the same
value, 7.6 for example.

I think, however, that it is also possible to regard an intersubjective
observation or concept as one collective experience with the whole
group of persons involved as the subject, the We. Logically both
interpretations seem equally possible. They both contradict solipsism,
but I regard the notion of collective consciousness as the more
precise one, and find that in several contexts it has the greater
heuristic value. In the following I shall write in more detail
about collective conscious experience and give evidence for the
heuristic value of this notion.

Collective conscious experiences will of course be related to
neurophysiologic processes in all the brains of the persons involved
( brains and persons, including the "I" are of course
here seen as heuristic structures in the catalog of scientific
observations), while neurophysiology usually studies conscious
experiences in association with one brain only. Here I believe
there is an extended domain for further experimental research.
I think it will be possible to study relations between changes
in two or more brains associated with collective experiences and
with processes leading to collective experiences.

Some conscious experiences, such as intersubjective scientific
observations and concepts, are readily seen to be shared with a
collective of persons, while other experiences appear to be more
individual; sometimes I feel that experiences I have are not shared
or only partly shared by persons with whom I communicate. This
feeling may be reciprocal and even shared, so it forms a known
and directly experienced part of a common collective consciousness.
This feeling may also give rise to a belief that the other person
has individual experiences different from mine, and even give rise
to thoughts about the nature of these experiences. Such thoughts
are, however, only conjectural, we cannot know the contents of
other individual minds, but I think we know and experience directly
the collective experiences. This I regard as an answer to the much
discussed problem of "other minds", thoughts about the
complete content of another mind remain conjectural, but what we
share collectively we can and do know by direct experience. I also
regard this view as the beginning of an approach to another much
discussed problem, that of animal mind (Randrup submitted a).

The boundary between individual and collective consciousness is,
however, blurred. If we talk together about our experiences, the
intersubjective or collective part will be expanded. This aspect
of intersubjectivity has been studied thoroughly by the phenomenological
school of psychology at Copenhagen University (Rubin, Tranekjær
Rasmussen, From). Tranekjær Rasmussen (1968, chapter 3, with
references) writes that through communication it is possible to
make certain conscious experiences "intersubjectively transportable" within
a group of people. A set of intersubjectively transportable experiences
he calls a recursive basis. Such recursive bases are established
within scientific disciplines (technical languages), but Tranekjær
Rasmussen thinks that within the disciplines little has been done
to state the recursive bases explicitly, and he thinks that working
to accomplish this will be an important task for both epistemology
and pedagogics. Obtaining intersubjectivity in psychology/psychiatry
aided by communication between scientists has been described recently
by Marchais (2000, pp. 124-125) and by Marchais, Grize, and Randrup
(1995, p. 371). I think that carefully established recursive bases
can be regarded as collective consciousness within a group of persons.
Since recursive bases in science can be quite comprehensive, we
may envisage that scientists, particularly scientists within one
discipline, have a significant part of their consciousness in common,
a collective consciousness.

Indeed, knowledge generally and many concepts such as "eleven," "energy," and
even "solipsism" cannot be individual at all, because
from the beginning they are shaped by communication and education.
This view is supported by several reflections in the literature.
Thus Jørgensen (1963, p. 176) describes in detail how two
persons can arrive at common names of certain phenomena such as "head", "arm", "green" etc.
by making observations together and communicate about the names.
He contends that originally we have all learned the names of things
and their properties in this way; in science further education
and communication has lead to the technical terms. In a personal
letter of March 20, 1999 Pierre Marchais asserted that the number
5 is an educational, not a subjective phenomenon, an example of
collective knowledge. He told me that the 5 exists in me only because
I have been taught arithmetic. Wautischer (1998, p. 12) maintains
that in most cultures knowledge is seen as belonging to a group
of people rather than being the result of individual effort. Likewise
Lutz (1992, p. 72) regards psychological and anthropological thought
systems as developing in a sociocultural context and as constructed
in interaction with that context. She also finds an essential similarity
between the cultural processes which structure academic psychology
and anthropology and those which structure other forms of ethnopsychology
and ethnoanthropology. Thornton (1996) states that language is
an irreducibly public form of life which is encountered in specifically
social contexts, and since a solipsist requires a language, Thornton
sees solipsism as an inherently incoherent theory. Allwood (1997)
writes in a similar vein; he regards dialogue as collective thinking
and contends that "language is an instrument for (collective)
activation of information (or thinking)". Artigiani (1996)
proposes an hypothesis defining mind as an emergent attribute of
complex social systems. He thinks that mind becomes the experience
of brains in social networking "computing" environmental
flows released by cooperative actions.

Jung has written comprehensively about the collective unconscious.
This might be regarded as something different from collective conscious
experience, but the Jungian analyst Bernstein writes "....the
collective unconscious which clearly implies a collective conscious" (Bernstein
1992, p. 25). And Bernstein (2000) has reported examples of directly
felt collective conscious experiences. LikewiseYoung-Eisendrath
and Hill (1992) think that Jung's later theory of archetypes and
self is a constructivist model of subjectivity that accounts for
the collective or shared organization of affective-imaginal life.
Constructivism they think reveals the impossibility of mental separatism
and recognizes the shared nature of mental processes that arise
within an interpersonal field.

In the literature several authors have discussed collective memory.
Thus Bryld andWarring (1998) have written a book about the Danish
collective memory of the German occupation 1940-1945. They describe
the formation of this collective memory during the years after
the war, influenced by the need of the the Danish people to regard
themselves as resistance heroes and not as collaborators. Halbwachs
(1975) has written a comprehensive general treatise about the social
frames of memory. He argues that the notion of individual memory
is insufficient and needs to be supplemented by group memory. Halbwachs
employs terms such as "collective perception", "collective
representations", "collective experience", "collective
reflections", "collective thought", and "collective
memories". I think that this can be seen as something like
the collective conscious experience, I am describing here.

Living and acting together can enhance intersubjectivity and collective
experience. The Danish philosopher and psychologist Jørgensen
has discussed this in some detail (1963, chapter 7). He writes
about "person-identification," i.e., identification with
another person, and distinguishes between emotive and conative
forms. The former refers to the catching effect of emotional states
and expressions, and the latter refers to situations where persons
act together to reach the same goal. More recently Vaughan (1995)
wrote in a similar way about emotive identification:

The soul that empathetically identifies with both the pain and
the joy of others
begins to see that in the inner world we are not separated from
each other. Peace
and joy, no less than pain and sorrow, are shared, collective experiences.
(p. 5).

And in a recent special issue of the journal ReVision (Rothberg
and Masters, 1998) several authors have given examples of collective
and egoless consciousness in couples living and acting together
in intimate relationships. Some excerpts from this special issue
follow:

..... they felt they were ..... one soul residing in two bodies.
(p. 8).

Also, a deep spiritual bond - which may be felt during the most
routine
activities and even far away - may develop. Robert Bly uses the
metaphor of
the "third body" as a way of describing the transpersonal
dimension that unites
a couple. It is the "soul" of the couple as one respondent
expressed it (p. 23).

Holding to a sense of self and to the bond feels at times to be
overwhelming.
Repeated dancing back and forth - now self, now disappearing, wave
to particle
and back..... separateness and union..... (p.9).

These examples show directly experienced, lived collective consciousness;
it is also possible to understand collective conscious experience
conceptually as described above in this section. The last example
given shows difficulties with reconciling the individual and the
collective. Personally I have experienced such difficulties too,
a temporary fear of losing myself. But these difficulties have
not been serious for me, after all the collective experience is
or becomes as familiar as the individual experience. When an experience
moves from individual to collective (by communication for example),
my immediate feeling is that the subject changes from I to We,
while the rest of the experience remains the same. In certain cases
the subject (I as well as We) vanishes altogether as described
below in the section on egoless experience. A sudden change from
experienced subject to no subject is particularly clearly described
in the report by Austin quoted in that section.

It seems probable that living and acting closely together in smaller
family and other groups has contributed to the experience and concepts
of collective consciousness encountered in various non-Western
cultures. In these cultures collective and relational features
of humans and their minds are emphasized at least as much as individual
features. I think this yields significant evidence supporting the
heuristic value of the concept of collective consciousness for
cross-cultural studies, and I shall relate some examples of this
evidence.

I have had some contact with Japanese psychiatry and shall quote
psychiatrist Okuyama, who has practiced both in Japan and in the
United States. She writes about the three senses of self among
the Japanese: the collective, the social, and the individual sense.
Of these, the collective sense is seen as the most important and
fundamental one. Okuyama states explicitly:

Japanese people commonly think that the self exists only in relationships
with
others... our mind is thought to exist in a field of relationships.
The self
cannot be considered separate from the relationship field nor having
as clear a
boundary, as Western people imagine.....one of the conditions to
be an adult
is the ability to feel somebody else's or the group's feelings.
(Okuyama 1993,
p. 29).

Arisaka (2001) writes in the same vein describing the Japanese
philosopher Watsuji's views: what is primary in human relation
is not the atomically separated "individuals", but rather
what is generated "in-between" such individuals as a
result of interaction.

"My being conscious of you is intertwined with your being
conscious of me.... in
the relation of Being-between the consciousness of the participants
are mutually
permeated through one another's" (quote from Watsuji 1996
given by Arisaka
2001, p 200).

Roland (1988) has written a comprehensive treatise on the self
in India and Japan. He emphasizes the sense of we-ness or we-self
and partial merger between individuals in these cultures, and he
stresses the contrast with the "individualistic I-self - the
predominant experiential self of Westerners." (pp. 196, 224-225,
285).

Orme-Johnson, Zimmerman and Hawkins (1997) describe Maharishi's
Vedic psychology which is based on the ancient Vedic tradition
of India and related to other ancient traditions in the East. According
to this psychology, collective consciousness is the wholeness of
consciousness of an entire group that arises from the individuals
that comprise the group. Each level of society - family, community,
city, state or province, nation, and the world - has a corresponding
collective consciousness.

Wu (1998) writes about togetherness which he regards as fundamental. "Actuality
is first organic togetherness.....before being analyzed into units
and indviduals" (p.11). He finds that this view agrees with
Chinese philosophy but not with Western analytic thinking.

The Senegalese philosopher Ndaw (1983) has written a comprehensive
doctoral thesis about African thought. He emphasizes that in African
cultures such as the Bambara and the Dogon the conception of the
person is more social than individual. The individual is conceived
as a center of relations.The person in Africa is not defined in
opposition to society, but society is seen as constitutive of the
person. Man is conceived as indissociable from the group and in
exact correspondence with the universe. (Ndaw 1983, chapter 3).
In agreement with this Harris (1997) writes about competing core
values in African American communities, individualism rooted in
European and Euro-American conceptions and African-centered value
rooted in collective consciousness.

Building on American Indian cultures Rÿser (1998) states
that humans and other peoples - including plants, minerals, fire,
winds, and animals - share a common consciousness, a common consciousness
in the universe. Singleness of consciousness he regards as always
temporary and fleeting while collective consciousness is the permanent
and perpetual condition of things. Rÿser's text is written
in English and he uses the word "consciousness", probably
with a meaning which has something to do with the concept of consciousness
followed by me (see the section on consciousness above).

Sorenson (1998) has studied indigenous people living in isolated
enclaves around the world more or less "untouched" by
dominant, conquering cultures. In these people he found a state
of mind which he calls Preconquest Consciousness. One of the characteristics
of this consciousness is an empathetic, integrative, intuitive
rapport between individuals. Sorenson found their way of life to
be simultaneously individualistic and collective. each person constantly
enlivening the others by a ceaseless, spirited, individualistic
input into a unified at-oneness. He felt strongly that this way
of life was very different from the ways of Western cultures, he
was used to, and even difficult to describe in the English language.
The difference was also clearly seen in some cases where a rapid
collapse of preconquest consciousness (sometimes within one week)
occurred after contact with dominant cultures.

These non-Westernviews are difficult or rather impossible to understand
on the background of a strictly individual concept of conscious
experience. If on the other hand collective consciousness is conceived
intellectually and experienced directly on the basis of scientific
activity as described above, this will open opportunities for understanding
the non-Western views and thus be helpful in cross-cultural studies.

Rosenstand's views on collective and individual self provides
further help for cross-cultural understanding. She thinks that "We
all know that "I am me", even if we don't use words such
as "self" or "I". But some cultures consider
this knowledge of minor importance" (Rosenstand 2002, p 251).

In the literature there are many other descriptions of collective
features in a number of cultures, indeed it seems that Western
individualism is an exceptional or unique phenomenon among the
world's cultures, past and present (Morris 1972, Rosenstand 2002,
pp. 240-251). In recent years, however, experiences with networks
of computers and of neurons (biological, artificial) have suggested
also to some Western authors a more collective concept of brain,
mind and conscious experiences.

Thus Freeman, author of the book "Societies of Brains" (1995)
concludes that "brains are preeminently social in nature" and
that "the most important thing about consciousness is thst
it's a social attribute." (Freeman and Burns 1996, pp. 178,
180). Likewise Huberman (1989) in his paper entitled "The
Collective Brain" states that intelligence is not restricted
to the single brain, but also appears in the workings of many human
organizations and scientific communities. He describes distributed
intelligence and computational ecosystems, the agents of which
operate concurrently with no central control, incomplete and sometimes
inconsistent and delayed information, and with a high degree of
communication. He finds many of these features also in networks
of computers. Personally I find that there is comprehensive communication
inside each brain as well as between brains. Inside a brain the
communication between neurons is mediated by transmitter substances
such as dopamine, actylcholine etc., and between brains it is mediated
mainly by sound and light waves. But I think that it is not the
nature of the mediating substances, but rather the information
content of the communication that is important for the working
of brains and for the relations between brains and consciousness.
And the information content can be very large in the communication
between brains as well as in communications within a brain.

Experiences with the Internet have given rise to new thoughts
about interaction and collectivity. Thus Gackenbach, Guthrie and
Karpen (1998) find that the most important characteristic of the
Internet is its emergent collective properties, and de Kerckhove
(1995) contends that the real nature of the Internet is to act
as a forum for collective memory and imagination. He also thinks
that on-line communications have created a new kind of permanence,
a new stability of mind, a collective mind, in which one plugs
in or from which one pulls out, but without affecting the integrity
of the structure other than by direct contribution.

Surfing, e-mailing and chatting on the Internet have given rise
to new psychological phenomena. Particularly Suler (1999) who created
the word "cyberpsychology" has published comprehensive
studies of these phenomena. Among other results he reports that

.....users often describe how their computer is an extension of
their mind and
personality - a "space" that reflects their tastes, attitudes,
and interests. In
psychoanalytic terms, computers and cyberspace may become a type
of
"
transitional space" that is an extension of the individual's
intrapsychic world. It
may be experienced as an intermediate zone between self and other
that is part
self and part other. As they read on their screen the e-mail, newsgroup,
or chat
message written by an internet comrade, some people feel as if
their mind is
merged or blended with that of the other.

I conclude that the notion of collective consciousness is well
founded in the available evidence. Its heuristic value is that
it admits of a more precise account of the ontology of intersubjectivity,
facilitates cross cultural studies, and strongly contradicts that
solipsism should be a consequence of immaterial world views.

Whitehead (1978, p. 81), however, also writes about "solipsism
of the present moment" which would mean that only present
experience exists. He thinks that this type of solipsism can only
be avoided if something more than presentational immediacy is included
in direct perception. The Danish philosopher Iversen (1917, pp.
369-372) gave up, when he contemplated the solipsism of the present
moment. He believed that he had then reached "rock bottom" and
that there was nothing further to say. This he illustrated by making
a hole of about ten lines in his text, before he continued on other,
less stringent conditions. Iversen made a strong impression on
me when I read his treatise in high school, but now I think, Iversen's
problem has been solved. The solution is given above in the section
on the psychological Now and in the following section about collective
conscious experience across time: the past and the future with
their content are constructs from the immediate experience in the
Now. These constructs are also experienced in the Now.

Collective Conscious Experience Across Time. The Ontology of History

In Western cultures time is usually conceived as linear, the past
and the future separated from the present. But the conception of
time and the attitude to the past and the future is and was different
in many other cultures, past and present. There exists a comprehensive
literature on this, for recent reviews reference can be made to
Gell (1992), Munn (1992), Vatsyayan (1996) and Withrow (1988).
In the following some specific examples of time concepts will be
given..

Nakamura (1991) emphasizes that the Indian conception of time
is very different from that in the West. Time is conceived statically
rather than dynamically. It is recognized in India that the things
of this world are always movng and changing, but the substance
of things is seen as basically unchanging, its underlying reality
unaffected by the ceaseless flux. The Indian directs our attention
not to the flow of water but to the river itself, the unchanging
universal. Nakamura thinks that the static conception of time permeates
Indian thought. Other authors use the word "timelessness" instead
of "static time", for example Mahadevan (1992) who writes
that timeless Brahman is the source of all orders of creation and
that time is the channel through which it is possible to return
to this source. Through meditation on time, one gets beyond time
to the eternal Absolute (p. 549). Gell (1992, pp. 71-72) quoting
Geertz describe Balinese time as "a motionless present, a
vectorless now". He thinks that this does not mean that the
Balinese are living in a different kind of time from ourselves,
but that they refuse to regard as salient certain aspects of temporal
reality which we regard as much more important, such as the cumulative
effects of historical time.

Hall and Hall (1990) write about monochronic and polychronic time.
Monochronic time corresponds with paying attention to and doing
only one thing at a time, while polychronic time corresponds with
being involved in many things at once. The cultures of the United
States, Switzerland Germany, and Scandinavia adhere to monochronic
time, while the Mediterranian peoples follow polychronic time.
Like oil and water the two systems do not mix, so for performing
international business it is essential to know about the difference.

Cyclic concepts of time are found in various cultures, for instance
in the ancient Greek culture. Rÿser (1998) describes this
view: "As time proceeds around the circle, one encounters
the past and repeats the transactions and events as the present." Rÿser
also thinks that this cyclical reality proved quite adequate for
the social, economical, and political life in antiquity around
the Mediterranean and throughout Africa. Williams (1986, p. 30)
judges that the Yolngu (Northern Territory of Australia) perceive
time as circular, so that from any particular time, what is past
may be future, and what is future may be past. And she quotes a
personal communication by von Sturmer: "Aborigines read life
backwards and forwards. We read it forward." She also states
that for the Yolngu time is in some contexts both cyclical and
circular, though this does not preclude a certain kind of lineal
causality (Williams (1986,p. 28).

In the Jewish way of thinking, as described by Steinsaltz (1980,
chapter 4), time is seen like a spiral or a helix rising up from
creation. Time is seen as a process, in which past, present, and
future are bound to each other as a harmonization of two motions:
progress forward and a countermotion backward, encircling and returning.
There is always a certain return to the past, a constant reversion
to basic patterns of the past, although it is never possible to
have a precise counterpart of any moment of the time.
Also in the Bantu culture time is conceived like a spiral. Each
season and each new generation return on the same vertical of the
spiral, but at a higher level (Kagame 1976). The Mayan concept
of time is often described as cyclical, but Rÿser (1998) finds
it more correct to shift the symbolism from a circle to a spiral.

Berndt (1974, p. 8) reports that with the Aboroginal Australians
mythological orsacred time exists alongside secular time but not
identical with it. The Aborigines recognize both kinds of time
as equally real, as applying in different, although overlapping,
sociocultural situations. Berndt and Berndt (1964, pp. 187-188)
write that for the Aborigines the beings said to have been present
at the beginning of things still continue to exist. In one sense
the past is still here, in the present, and is part of the future
as well. But the Aborigines also recognize various time categories
in connection with their everyday activities: days and nights,
moons, the sequence or cycle of seasons. Mowaljarlai (Mowaljarlai
and Malnic 1993, pp. 67-68)
explains that when you are in an ancient state of mind, time stands
still, because your mind is in a state where time does not count.
Ancient time is no time.

More, comprehensive evidence for experience being regarded as
existing in both past and present has emerged from several studies
of the Australian Aboriginal culture. Thus Elkin (1964, p. 210)
states:

In those rituals we were "in the Dreaming". We were
not just
commemorating or re-enacting the past. Whatever happened in the
mythic past was happening now, and there is no doubt that the men
were "carried away" by the experience.

This statement by Elkin is particularly clear and explicit, but
it is substantiated by several other reports about past events
reoccurring in the present during rituals and ceremonies in the
Australian culture (Berndt 1974, pp. 27-28, Berndt and Berndt 1964,
pp. 226-227, Hume 1999, pp. 9 -10, Isaacs 1992, p. 34, Strehlow
1968, pp. 29-30 and 1971, p. 611) .

Also in other cultures than the Australian ritual time may differ
from secular time. Thus Silverman (1997) writes about the Eastern
Iatmul, New Guinea:

Although Eastern Iatmul time can be incremental and linear, the
naming
system and totemic identifications seem to merge the present and
the past.
To some degree, so does the cyclical temporality of the kinship
system. This
form of time is also present in Eastern Iatmul rituals such as
curing rites
which often enact primordial events as if they were occuring in
the present.

And Lancaster ( 1993, p. 2) writes about the Jewish culture that
time for sacred history is not the everyday passing time of literal
history, but that mysterious dimension of time which is eternally
present. He thinks that while literal history may satisfy the rational
mind there are deeper dimensions to the psyche for which sacred
history can provide an equally satisfying picture of the way things
really are.

Like some other people the Australians believe in reincarnation.
It is the soul or spirit (which would include what is here called
consciousness) of the deceased which is believed to reappear in
a person living in the present. This can of course be seen as an
example of the past appearing in the present and as an extreme
example of consciousness shared across time. Australian conceptions
of reincarnation are described by several authors. Strehlow (1971,
pp. 615-617) relates how an ancestral supernatural being can become
reincarnated into the unborn child of a pregnant woman. This may
happen while she (or, in some areas, her husband) is experiencing
a dream-vision of the future child brought on by the supernatural
being who is seeking rebirth. Strehlow also reports that in sacred
ritual totemic ancestors are represented by their human reincarnations
(1971, pp. 611 and 619-620). Berndt (1974, p. 28) states that during
the process of initiation, a father could take his son away to
a secret place and sing into him the spirit-double of his own assistant
totem. In this way that totem spirit merges with the youth's own
spirit. Isaacs (1992, p. 230) relates that the Walbiri people of
the central desert believe that there are secret caves containing
hidden 'Dreaming' stones which are storehouses of disembodied spirits
who may enter a woman again and so be reborn. After death the spirit
returns to the cave and remains there until the same process is
repeated, but this time the spirit becomes a child of the opposite
sex to its previous incarnation. Williams (1986, p. 30) writes
in a similar way about reincarnation of the souls of the Yolngu
who live in the Northern Territory of Australia.

In a more general way it has been stated by several anthropologists
that for the Australians the past underlies and is within the present.
Thus Stanner (1971, p. 289) writes that

Although the Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred heroic
time of the
infinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still
part of the present.
One cannot "fix" The Dreaming in time: it was , and is,
everywhen.

Elkin (1964, pp. 231-236) maintains that for the Aborigines the
past is present, here and now. The present is the past latent and
potential now. Through ritual and behaviour it is realized. History
there is, but it is the myth of that which is behind or within,
rather than before the present. Experiences and conceptions of
the past in the present are also reported from other cultures,
particularly in connection with ritual. Overviews have been published
by Bloch (1977) and Hvidtfeldt (1961). Hvidtfeldt thinks that our
own conception of events is like pearls on a string, while in many
other cultures events are seen as a heap of pearls from which one
can draw now one pearl and now another, view it closely, and put
it back. History is in the past but also present, it is lived and
relived in the cult. History is future too, it will be relived
as long as the world exists.

In spite of the West's assumed separation of the past from the
present, parts of the past are believed to exist in the present,
also in the West. This applies to material objects; in particular
more abstract objects of physics such as electrons and quarks are
believed to be exactly the same as they were fifty years ago and
even billions of years ago. Also artefacts such as stone tools
uncovered by archeology are supposed to be the same as when they
were used in the past.

With the idealist ontology the materialist entities and events
in history may be regarded as heuristic concepts, just like the
material things in the present. Time itself may also be regarded
as a heuristic concept useful for further ordering of our conscious
experiences in the Now. I suppose that the different conceptions
of time in various cultures are and have been useful in this way.
This goes for the concepts of time in physics too; thus in modern
physics the idea of static time is sometimes entertained and regarded
as useful, in particular in association with relativity theory
and cosmology ( Einstein and Infeld 1963, chapter 3, section on
space time continuum, Hawking 1988, chapter 8). Hawking describes
the theory of imaginary time, a spatial and therefore static dimension,
and states that like other theories in physics, it is a mathematical
model for describing our observations. He finds that it is meaningless
to ask whether the usual or the imaginary time is the correct or
real one, the question is, which description is the most useful
(Hawking 1988, chapter 8). It may be added here that both of these
concepts of time express structures in the catalog of scientific
observations useful in different domains. We are aware of this
catalog in the Now, in the focus and in the margin.

Hawking's views are of course in complete agreement with the idealist
ontology of matter and time advocated here and in a previous paper
(Randrup 2002). It is also in agreement with this ontology that
in historical science history has often been altered with the advent
of new evidence. Thus the conception of the electron has changed
during this century, and in each period it has been assumed that
electrons existed in the past exactly as they were in the actual
conception. Another example: very recently the age of Copenhagen
city has been raised due to new archeological finds; according
to what the historians now state, the one mile long coffee table,
which was arranged in 1967 to celebrate the 800th anniversary of
Copenhagen, was held about 100 years too late (Gautier, Skaarup,
Gabrielsen, Kristiansen, and Ejlersen 1999). These historians also
say that until quite recently the historical topography of Copenhagen
was built on learned constructions which over the years had acquired
almost mythical character; data were not separated from interpretations
(p. 38). Lowenthal (1985, chapter 6) has written more generally
about changing the past.

The historian Collingwood (1993) thinks that also thoughts from
history can appear in the present. He sees the task of history
as re-enactment of past experience, more specifically rethinking
of past thought. He thinks that he can re-enact in his own mind
the very same thoughts that were thought by persons in the past.
This can of course be regarded as collective conscious experiences
across time. Collingwood gives examples and arguments to support
his idea of history. In order to be sure that he really thinks
the same thought that occurred in the past, he considers all the
evidence relevant to the past thinker and the specific thought
in question. As an elaborate example he scrutinizes the thinking
of a certain emperor about an edict in the Theodosian Code (p.283).
Collingwood's idea of history has aroused much interest among historians
and has been widely discussed since its first publications in 1928
and 1946 (Collingwood 1993, editor's introduction, Dray 1995, Mann
1998). In religious or artistic context a few other Western authors
have written about sharing experiences with historical persons
(Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988, pp. 237-239, Lansky
1999, Schutz 1964, pp.171-175).

On a biological and evolutionary background Sheets-Johnstone (1990,
p.352-362) also considers re-enactment of past experience. She
uses a method called hermeneutical phenomenology and thinks that
by this means "we might accede, and in the closest possible
way, to the actual experiences of the ancestral hominids."

By writing about re-enactment of past thought Collingwood (and
Sheets-Johnstone) seem to regard the thoughts in history as fixed
facts that existed in the past. This is in agreement with the usual
Western linear conception of time. But it is also possible to assume
that the historian gradually develops thoughts, about the emperor
and the edict mentioned above for example, that fit the historical
evidence (here seen as conscious experiences in the Now) and therefore
may be seen as shared with a historical person such as the emperor
(here seen as a construct based on historical evidence). Such sharing
would be parallel to the development of collective consciousness
with contemporaries by communication as described in the preceding
section.

This interpretaton of Collingwood's work has much in common with
some newer trends in the methodology of historical science. Thus
van Veuren (2000) writes that the post-modernist view of history
is anti-realist and skepticist: history is non-referential. We
can never "really know" the past. When we study the past
we move in a closed circuit of stories/readings/accounts out of
which we cannot get to check if they correspond to the past "as
such".

Egoless Experience.The Ontology of Worlds Without an Ego

Egoless consciousness differs from both individual and collective
consciousness. In egoless experiences the subject, the I as well
as the We, is ignored or forgotten. In the literature there are
many descriptions of egoless experiences occurring in both secular
and spiritual states of mind.

Csikszentmihalyi (1997, Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi
1988) has made psychological studies of engagement with everyday
life. He has heard artists, athletes, composers, dancers, scientists,
and people from all walks of life describe how it feels when they
are doing things that are worth doing for their own sake, and he
reports that in these descriptions his informants used terms that
are interchangeable in their minutest details. This unanimity suggested
to Csikszentmihalyi that the descriptions are of a very specific
experiential state to which he has given the name "flow".
The main dimensions of flow are described as intense involvement,
deep concentration, clarity of goals and feedback, loss of a sense
of time, lack of self-consciousness and transcendence of a sense
of self (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988, p. 365).

The egoless feature of the flow state is described in more detail
several times in the book edited by Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi
(1988): "Because of the deep concentration on the activity
at hand, the person in flow ... loses temporarily the awareness
of self that in normal life often intrudes in consciousness ...
In flow the self is fully functioning, but not aware of itself
doing it ... " (p. 33). "An activity that fosters a merging
of action and awareness with a centering of attention on a limited
stimulus field will lead inevitably to a loss of the ego construct,
a loss of awareness of the 'I' as actor." (p.223). Referring
to cruising in a sailboat: "... the oneness with the natural
environment allows for a loss of ego boundaries ... Occasionally,
especially in storm conditions, a total loss of ego occurs ... " (p.
231).

In agreement with this the physicist Mach (1914, chapter I, section
12) wrote that during absorption in some idea the ego may be partially
or wholly absent.

Personally I remember a clearly egoless secular experience: the
process of finishing a manuscript was experienced as that which
existed, and when this process was finally completed, an experience
like throwing up occurred as the beginning of the reappearance
and separation of the manuscript and I as two entities. I think
this was an example of the flow experience. Another detailed description
of a secular egoless experience is reported by the gestalt psychologist
Koffka (1963, pp. 323 f).

In reports of experiences regarded as spiritual or mystical dissolution
of all ego boundaries and forgetfulness of the ego are often mentioned,
and also a general feeling of unity including fading or complete
disappearance of the boundary between subject and object (Randrup
1999, with references).

Austin (2000, p. 215, 2000 a) reports a personal experience which
appeared suddenly and unexpectedly, when he was on the surface
platform of the London subway:

And despite the other qualities infusing it, the purely optical
aspects of the
scene are no different from the way they were a split second before.
The
pale- gray sky, no bluer; the light, no brighter; the detail, no
finer-grained ...
But there is no viewer. The scene is utterly empty, stripped of
every last
extension of an I-Me- Mine. Vanished in one split second is the
familiar
sense thatthis person is viewing an ordinary city scene. The new
viewing
proceeds impersonally, no pausing to register the ... paradox that
no human
subject is "doing" it.

This experience continued for a few seconds. Then followed a second
wave where a distant quasi-person was being ever so remotely inferred.
This second wave lasted another three to five seconds followed
by a third wave. In this some kind of diminutive subjective I seemed
to exist off in the background, because something vague was responding
with faint discriminations. After another three to five seconds
a growing, self-referent awareness entered. It discovered that
it had a physical center inside the bodily self of that vaguely
familiar person who was now standing on the platform. A little
later a thoughtful I boarded the next subway train.

Austin's detailed report shows the complete disappearance of the
ego and its gradual return. Other reports emphasize unity with
environment . Thus Smith reports an incidence of "cosmic consciousness" (CC):

At this point I merged with the light and everything, including
myself,
became one unified whole. There was no separation between myself
and the
rest of the universe. In fact to say that there was a universe,
a self, or any
"
thing" would be misleading - it would be an equally correct
description to
say that there was "nothing" as to say that there was "everything".
To say
that subject merged with object might be almost adequate as a description
of
the entrance into CC, but during CC there was neither "subject" nor
"
object"...... just a timeless unitary state of being (Smith
and Tart 1998, p.
100).

These are direct experiences of the environment or the universe
without the ego in the usual central position. It is, however,
also possible to think of the world decentered from the ego or
even with another ego as the center. The change from the Ptolemaic
to the Copernican view of the planetary system is an example of
such decentering. Since then, science has continued the decentering
process and developed an "objective" world view.

The decentered world of science is, however, as mentioned above,
most often considered as a material world projected "out there" and
separate from the human mind. This makes it difficult to place
consciousness in the scientific picture. In contrast, an egoless
experience of the world (perceived or conceived) is still a conscious
experience and avoids the dichotomy between the material and the
mental. On such a monistic background, worldviews centered on an
ego, centered on a collective, or completely decentered (egoless)
are not in conflict, but can be seen as different structures in
the same catalog of conscious experiences. It is known that there
can be more than one structure in a system of elements, for example,
in ambiguous figures. These are perceived in two or more alternating
gestalts, only one at a time, but in thought it can be conceived
that the two or more structures or gestalts exist simultaneously
in the figure (Burling 1964, Gregory 1998, chapter 10, Randrup
1992). This point is also illustrated by the following anecdote
quoted from Randrup, Munkvad and Fog (1982): A visitor to Florida
wanted to mail a baby turtle to his son at camp. The clerk in the
Post Office read the regulations aloud: "Well", he said "Dogs
is dogs and cats is dogs, squirrels in cages is birds - - and baby
turtles is insects" For postal purposes this alternative structure
was preferred to the usual Linnean structure in zoology.

In some cases egoless experiences are not only without ego but
also without other content such as perceptions, thoughts etc. This
is called pure consciousness, contentless consciousness, experience
of nothingness, emptiness or void etc.. There are many descriptions
of this type of experience in the literature from Indian, Jewish
and other sources. The descriptions differ to some extent, the
nothingness seems to be more or less complete, but surely these
experiences lack many details known from ordinary, daily experiences.
Lancaster (2000, p. 237) quoting Sullivan gives a clear example
of a contentless experience which followed a road accident:

There was something, and the something was not the nothing (of
total
unconsciousness). The nearest label for the something might possibly
be
'awareness', but that could be misleading, since any awareness
I'd ever had
before the accident was my awareness, my awareness of one thing
or
another. In contrast, this something ..... had no I as its subject
and no
content as its object. It just was.
Lancaster adds that he sees no reason to contradict the direct
evidence of such experiences and that seemingly contentless conscious
states need to be incorporated within a meaningful psychology of
consciousness.

This egoless experience of Sullivan clearly differs from the expereience
of Austin reported above, where the optical details of the scene
he saw were unchanged, only the ego, the viewer was lacking.

Much information on pure consciousness is collected in a book
on the topic edited by Forman (1990). In this book Griffiths (1990)
writes on pure consciousness in Indian Buddhism. He describes the
ascent through a series of altered states of consciousness or spheres
with varying degrees of nothingness. These spheres are thought
of as both cosmic realms, locatable in space, and as psychological
conditions (p. 81). The immediate conscious experience and the
world view are thus harmonized or unified.

Also Hayward (1987) has written about emptiness in Buddhism. His
exposition is based on the term shunyata from the Mahayana school
of Buddhism (p. 203). This term has been variously translated as
emptiness, void, nothingness and openness. According to Hayward
shunyata means empty of concept, of mental fabrication or projection,
it means what is, free from concept. Emptiness can not be elucidated
in words and concepts, it can be pointed to only as direct experience.
Emptiness is also seen as a mark or characteristic of every phenomenon,
the ground of all phenomena. It is therefore both a direct experience
and a world view. The full experience of shunyata is said to be
one of great joy, because at the same time as realizing emptiness
of conceptions, there is awareness of complete purity (p. 217).
To me this means that shunyata is not completely empty, since it
contains the experience of both joy and purity.

Wallace (1999, p. 183) writes about attainment of the samatha
state in Buddhist tradition by means of a certain technique: "Bringing
no thoughts to mind, one lets the mind remain like a cloudless
sky, clear, empty, and evenly devoid of grasping onto any kind
of object." Samatha is characterized by joy, clarity and non-conceptuality.

Orme-Johnson, Zimmerman and Hawkins (1997) have given a very clear
account of Maharishi's Vedic psychology which is based on the ancient
Vedic tradition of India.. By means of a special meditation technique
it is possible to reach a state of pure awareness or transcendental
consciousness. In this state consciousness is all by itself, without
any object other than itself to be aware of. The mind settles down
to a state of no activity, but with full awareness. In the Vedic
psychology consciousness is seen as primary, and matter as a projection
of consciousness. The cosmic psyche, a field of pure consciousness,
is described as an undifferentiated wholeness which gives rise
to the infinite diversity of creation. The cosmic psyche is regarded
as the source of all existence, the ultimate reality. It is also
seen as the basis of the individual mind. At the pinnacle of human
development, unity consciousness, the individual is regarded as
a fully integrated expression of the cosmic psyche. Thus the world
view and the direct experience is harmonized in Vedic psychology.

Egolessness and nothingness are also important elements of Jewish
mysticism, both as direct experience and in the conception of the
world.. There is a tradition of gradual contemplative ascent to
higher planes. At a high plane the mystic no longer differentiates
one thing from another. Conceptual thought, with all its distinctions
and connections, dissolves; awareness of the self disappears. Fortune
(1995, p. 107) reports that at the one occasion, when she touched
the edge of the highest level, keter, of the tree of life, it appeared
as a glaring white light in which all thought vanished completely.
Keter is also seen as the totality of all existence. Since God's
being or essence is believed to be incomprehensible and ineffable,
He is described as nothing. God is greater than any thing one can
imagine, like no thing. To many mystics creation of the world out
of nothing means just creation out of God. This nothing from which
everything has sprung is not a mere negation; only to us does it
present no attributes, because it is beyond the reach of intellectual
knowledge. In truth, however, this nothing is infinitely more real
than all other reality. So in Jewish mysticism the direct experience
and the world view are united.While ascending to higher planes
of consciousness the mystic strives to get close to God or nothingness.
Some believe it is possible for man to ascend to absorption in
God with complete elimination of individuality and with no possibility
for returning, but on this point opinions are divided among Jewish
scholars. Among a number of important sources describing egolessness
and nothingness in Jewish mysticism are Fortune (1995), Idel (1988),
Matt (1990), Scholem (1955), and Winther (1986, 2001).

The Ontology of Worlds Comprising Spiritual Experiences

In the international discourse the word "spirituality" is
used with many different meanings. My personal understanding of
nature-spirituality appears from a private letter written July
7, 1994: "This morning, when I went into my garden (about
10 minutes ago), I had what I now call a spiritual experience.
I experienced the garden (the trees, the grass etc.) clearly more
intensely than at other occasions, when I also loved the garden.
This time I experienced "the eternal now" as well, and
immediately after I thought that the felt importance and intensity
of my experience was more essential than its duration and its position
in the ordinary time." I also remember having experienced
entropy, a more abstract, theoretical entity of nature, in this
spiritual way.

This description accords with two other descriptions from the
literature, which seem to report immediate experiences, independent
of any structured religious or philosophical conviction. One is
from the autobiography "The Story of my Heart" by Richard
Jefferies (1848 - 1887) who was a writer, in his own time regarded
as an atheist.

With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me,all the intense
communion I
held with the earth, the sun and the sky, the stars hidden by the
light, with the
ocean - in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings
be written - with
these I prayed.... (Jefferies 1910, p. 6)

The second description is from the partially autobiographic book "Where
the Spirits Ride the Wind" by Felicitas Goodman.

Very soon I discovered all on my own what being an adult apparently
meant,
and confided it to my diary: "The magic time is over".
For all of a sudden
and without the slightest warning, I realized that I could no longer
effortlessly call up what in my terms was magic: that change in
me that was
so deliciously exciting and as if I were opening a door, imparting
a special
hue to whatever I chose. I noticed the curious impediment first
with the
fresh, crunchy snow which fell right after my birthday. It was
nice, but I
could not make it glow ( Goodman 1990, p. 3)
Later in life Felicitas Goodman regained her "magic",
when she studied shamanism both by anthropological methods and
by own experiences.

I regard these three experiences as examples of nature spirituality,
but Pierre Marchais (1997, 1999, 2000, personal communications
1994-1999) while recognizing the occurrence of this kind of experiences
prefers to name them "exceptional intuitive experiences".
For Marchais "authentic spirituality" is an act of faith,
a part of religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian religions.
He characterizes the former type of experiences, and also East
Asian mysticism and transcendence with the French word "supranaturel",
while the "authentic spirituality" is characterized by
the word "surnaturel". This distinction between supranaturel
and surnaturel is fundamental in his view.

Such use of visible nature as the stuff of ontological perceptions
the medium whereby the self reaches out to the Absolute, is not
rare in the history of
mysticism. The mysterious vitality of trees, the silent magic of
the forest,
the strange and steady cycle of its life, possess in a peculiar
degree this
power of unleashing the human soul ..... The flowery garment of
the world is for some mystics a medium of ineffable perception,
a source of exalted
joy, the veritable clothing of God.
This view is supported by quotations from several European mystics
(pp. 190-196).

For Pierre Marchais the meaning of the word "spirituality" is
therefore more restricted than it is for me (and for Underhill).
Marchais and I have had prolonged exchange on these issues and
have come to agree on much, also that even though the terms may
differ ("nature spirituality" versus "exceptional
intuitive experiences" for instance) it is possible to agree
on the phenomena.

But Marchais and I still differ with respect to the Perennial
Philosophy. This philosophy is based on a broad sense of the word
spirituality comprising both nature spirituality, East Asian mysticism,
shamanistic transcendence, and experiences embedded in Judeo-Christian
religions. It assumes that there is a similarity or common core
to all experiences of spirituality (understood in this broad sense)
across cultures and across the ages. It does not regard the distinction
of Marchais between the supranaturel and the surnaturel as important
and is therefore not accepted by him. I, on the other hand, tend
to agree with the perennialists, although I admit that since spiritual
experiences are often felt as ineffable, transverbal, it is difficult
to discuss the idea of the Perennial Philosophy in words. My positive
attitude to this philosophy therefore rests on intuition more than
on reason (Randrup 1998).

In the special integration group Spirituality and Systems within
the International Society for the Systems Sciences the Perennial
Philosophy is widely accepted, and on this basis it seems possible
that some intersubjectivity might be obtained through communication.
Since 1991 such communication has been performed at annual meetings
in this group (Randrup 1997a). The exchange has lead to better
understanding of both differences and similarities between the
participants, and the exchange is still going on. For me personally
the direct communication with colleagues from other cultures (Japanese,
Indian, American Indian, Aboriginal Australian etc.) has been particularly
illuminating. In the group we have abstained from attempts to define
spirituality, but rather try to understand it by means of the examples
presented at our meetings.

Based on all these experiences and exchanges I think that the
immediate spiritual experience is the foundation of all spiritual
beliefs and their ontology. This applies to occidental and oriental
religions, Aboriginal Australian belief systems, shamanism etc.

Shamanism is described in various ways, but Wautischer (1989)
finds that shamanic experiences are intersubjectively accessible.
These experiences often involve a certain state of mind in which
a journey to another world or reality may be experienced. Anthropologist
Michael Harner, a pioneer of neo-shamanism has written about the
ontology of this other world:

In shamanic experience, when one is in non-ordinary reality things
will seem quite as material as they are here. One feels the
coldness or warmth of the air, the hardness or smoothness of a
rock; one perceives colors, sounds, odors and so forth. All the
phenomena that characterize the so-called material world will
appear just as real and material there as they do here if it is
an
extremely clear shamanic journey (Harner 1987, p. 4).

Harner goes on stating that the shaman does not regard these non-ordinary
phenomena as a projection of his own mind, but rather as another
reality which exists independently of that mind. Harner's own view
on the ontology of this "other reality" is more cautious
as expressed later in the same paper (p. 15): "As a person
who has followed the path of shamanism for a long time, I am inclined
to think that there is more to the universe than the human mind".
(Italics by the present author).

These two views, the alternate world as an independent external
reality or as a mental projection are described and discussed in
the literature by several authors (Peters 1989, p. 118, Peters
and Price-Williams 1980, pp. 405-406, Turner 1992, Vaughan 1995,
p. 7, Walsh 1989, pp. 30-31, Wautischer 1989, Wiebe 2000). This
problem is completely parallel to the problem about the ontology
of the material world in modern science: does it exist independentally "out
there", or is it rather a mental projection or heuristic concept
based on regularities in the occurrence of the immediate experiences
? In science the view of an external material reality has run into
contradictions as described above. An idealist ontology based on
conscious experiences seems to be a more viable alternative, but
this does not mean that we can control the processes of sense experiences
at will (Berger and Luckman 1966, Introduction, p. 1, Diettrich
!995, pp. 96, 103-105, Randrup submitted) and the same seems to
be true for shamanic experiences. The shamanic world view as well
as the scientific can be seen as mental constructs useful for structuring
the immediate experiences in the Now.

Turning to the religions more familiar in the West we may say,
rationally that God can be seen as a something (or a nothing) which
brings coherence to both sensory and spiritual experiences and
to the felt urges to behave ethically. Even fear of God may be
seen as fear of performing something unethical which may harm family,
society, nature, and oneself.

All this is a rational account, but religion is rather experienced
or known in an intuitive-spiritual mode. Spiritual experiences
are usually regarded as mainly ineffable, beyond words, but it
may be said that spiritually God is imagined either as like a person
or in a more abstract way. It seems to me that my rational account
above agrees with the abstract spiritual imagination of God, as
well as rationality can ever agree with spirituality. This suggests
that there is a difference but no principal conflict between science
and religion. When these things dawned to me, it was felt as a
great relief.

Note

The content of this paper is influenced by prolonged exchange
in the Spirituality and Systems group of the International Society
for the Systems Sciences (Randrup 1997a) and in the Center for
Interdisciplinary Research, CIRIP (Marchais and Randrup 1993),
in particular with Pierre Marchais, Elaine Smith, Søren
Brier, Grethe Sørensen, and Lin Waddell.